An Introduction to Automated Mobile Survey

Aaron Morris from Allpoint Systems just sent me a link to his PointTalk blog post in which he describes their new indoor mobile mapping system that was on display last week at SPAR 2012. The team at Allpoint created Automated Mobile Survey (AMS) to maximize the performance of existing laser scanning tools. Their aim is for AMS to boost scanning productivity by allowing users to do more work with less resource.

As we heard last week 3D laser scanning and robotics are merging. This is great news for the laser scanning industry because the robotics algorithms, especially in the SLAM area – simultaneous location and mapping are quite robost. They have been in development for nearly 20 years.

Aaron explains, “Our Automated Mobile Platform (AMP) is a self-guided mobile platform that carries and operates a 3D scanner and is programmed to follow a specific path for the purpose of collecting scans automatically. AMP is first walked through a scan area to create a “base map” of the space. The base map is a 2D floor plan allowing operators to specify a drive path and scan locations. When complete, AMP is ready to start work.”